Loop closure detection by compressed sensing for exploration of mobile robots in outdoor environments

In the problem of simultaneously localization and mapping (SLAM) for a mobile robot, it is required to detect previously visited locations so the estimation error shall be reduced. Sensor observations are compared by a similarity metric to detect loops. In long term navigation or exploration, the number of observations increases and so the complexity of the loop closure detection. Several techniques are proposed in order to reduce the complexity of loop closure detection. Few algorithms have considered the loop closure detection from a subset of sensor observations. In this paper, the compressed sensing approach is exploited to detect loops from few sensor measurements. In the basic compressed sensing it is assumed that a signal has a sparse representation is a basis which means that only a few elements of the signal are non-zero. Based on the compressed sensing approach a sparse signal can be recovered from few linear noisy projections by l₁ minimization. The difference matrix which is widely used for loop detection has a sparse structure, where similar observations are shown by zero distance and different locations are indicated by ones. Based on the multiple measurement vector technique which is an extension of the basic compressed sensing, the loop closure detection is performed by comparison of few sensor observations. The applicability of the proposed algorithm is investigated in some outdoor environments through some publicly available data sets. It has been shown by some experiments that the proposed method can detect loops effectively.